title: Botany and a changing world: introduction to the special issue on global biological change.
abstract: The impacts of global change have heightened the need to understand how organisms respond to and influence these changes. Can we forecast how change at the global scale may lead to biological change? Can we identify systems, processes, and organisms that are most vulnerable to global changes? Can we use this understanding to enhance resilience to global changes? This special issue on global biological change emphasizes the integration of botanical information at different biological levels to gain perspective on the direct and indirect effects of global change. Contributions span a range of spatial scales and include both ecological and evolutionary timescales and highlight work across levels of organization, including cellular and physiological processes, individuals, populations, and ecosystems. Integrative botanical approaches to global change are critical for the ecological and evolutionary insights they provide and for the implications these studies have for species conservation and ecosystem management.
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Irvine, California 92697, USA. sgweller@uci.edu
authors.forename: Stephen G
authors.initials: SG
authors.lastname: Weller
authors.forename: Katharine
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Suding
authors.forename: Ann K
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Sakai
mesh_terms: D057231:Climate Change; D017753:Ecosystem; D004784:Environmental Monitoring; D010802:Phylogeny; D063245:Plant Development; D018521:Plant Physiological Phenomena; D010944:Plants / Q000145:classification* / Q000235:genetics; D013045:Species Specificity
keywords: community dynamics; flowering phenology; functional traits; global biological change; invasive species; land-use patterns; plant–microbial interactions; species interactions